Oz wrote in the comments on my post about cookie recipes: Here’s a question: what about businesses or services that involve technical expertise or specialized equipment? Does is still work if I can say I have 5 recipes but they won’t do the general public any good (and is actually quite boring)? Examples: – almost…
In the computer technology world, there are two terms that indicate how delicate a system is: coupling and brittleness. A tightly coupled system is one in which there isn’t a lot of room for error. Things work seamlessly when they do work, however, because there’s no slack, no inefficiency, no excess. A loosely coupled system…
Here’s a simple but not easy question: how subject to cyclicality is your marketing? Human beings are naturally cyclical in nature, because that’s how the planet around us operates. We do things differently when it’s summer weather than when there’s a foot of snow on the ground. That’s so obviously logical that it shouldn’t need…
If you’re an avid fan of the Evernote application, then you’ll appreciate this little-publicized feature that someone pointed out to me. Take any text list on either your mobile Evernote or your desktop Evernote and hit the checkbox button, once at the beginning of each line, and voila! Instant checklist that you can tap or…
Here’s an unsurprising confession: I’m a fan of knives. (Warcraft rogues, you can stop giggling now) I’ve probably got more knives than any other class of tool in my house, even accounting for an absurd number of misplaced and lost screwdrivers, and I use knives on a daily basis more than any other piece of…
Maki was born in April of 2001, presumably by a breeder trying for a pure Chartreux cat. I got her from the local animal shelter, the victim of a marketing problem – she had a small patch of white fur beneath her chin which made her, for show purposes, a sub-standard member of her breed.…
Almost every single food manufacturer in the world does the same thing with their product, a way to help provide value and hopefully get the consumer to buy and use more of it. They include recipes. Some recipes become famous in their own right; the back of the Nestle chocolate chips package contains a recipe…
What’s the fundamental problem that NBC and others are facing with the Olympics, resulting in things like the #NBCFail movement? Is it crass commercialism and ad-driven media? Is it a time zone issue? Is it bad reporting? Nope. Fundamentally, the issue beneath everything around the coverage of the Olympics boils down to this simple but…
I recently had an interesting conversation with the manager of an ad network’s media buyer section. They revealed an interesting insider tip that I thought was worth sharing: most self-serve pay-per-click (PPC) networks are remnant inventory networks, from LinkedIn to Google Adwords to Facebook Ads, etc. What does that mean? Remnant inventory is spare inventory,…
